Greeley tucks in for another season of road construction with little funding

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
A car drives by a a school crossing sign printed on the cracked pavement of Reservoir Road Tuesday morning in Greeley. According to Greeley's Joel Hemesath, Greeley’s public works director, two-thirds of the city’s roads are on the verge of or already need major repair.

With the $5.6 million set aside for road maintenance in Greeley this year, public works crews will overlay more than 5 miles of road, in addition to less costly improvements on an array of other roads. The most prominent this year:

» 11th Street: 50th to 54th avenues

» 13th Street: 13th to 15th avenues

» 20th Street: 14th to 11th avenues

» 25th Street: 4th to 6th avenues

» 26th Street: 4th Avenue to the Garden City limit

» 28th Street: 23rd to 17th avenues

» 4th Avenue: 25th to 26th streets

» 8th Avenue: 23rd to 25th streets

» 10th Avenue: 9th to 5th streets

» Reservoir Road: 23rd Avenue to 28th Street

» 50th Avenue: 10th Street to cul-de-sac south of 13th Street

» 71st Avenue: 4th to C streets

Related Media

In some ways, it’s good for Greeley to have spring rains that worsen the city’s many potholes, Joel Hemesath said.

The more visible the cracks, the more likely people will believe that Hemesath, Greeley’s public works director, isn’t lying when he says that two-thirds of the city’s roads are on the verge of needing, or already need, major repair. At 111 miles of road in need of overlay — the most expensive kind of road construction — Greeley is behind by about $78 million in road maintenance.

Using what is called a PQI, or Pavement Quality Index, Hemesath calculated that Greeley needs to spend at least $12 million per year to keep road conditions similar to what they are now.

Until 2011, Greeley spent an average of $3 million per year from the Food Tax fund, which dedicates 70 percent to road maintenance. After an infusion of severance taxes and an uptick in the economy, city officials in 2011 allocated carryover money to total $6.1 million to the Food Tax fund. In 2012, the fund was up to $7.8 million.

This year, Greeley is set to spend $5.6 million on road maintenance, after the city council dedicated $3 million of this year’s $10 million surplus to the Food Tax fund.

While that’s an improvement, Hemesath said, it’s still too tight of a budget to focus on much more than Greeley’s larger roads.

“People are probably driving on pretty good roads,” he said of recent improvements on Greeley’s arterial roads. “I’m not sure they feel we have a road problem.”

But most of Greeley’s residential streets, which make up the majority of the city’s road system, have been neglected for some time, Hemesath said, with about a third garnering a PQI rating of 40 or worse.

The PQI scale ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 being pavement that is like new. Anything below a PQI of 68 is considered pavement in poor condition. Greeley’s average PQI right now is 64, Hemesath said.

If the city were to contribute $3 million to road maintenance each year, the average PQI by 2020 would plummet to 45 — meaning that essentially all of Greeley’s roads would need to be repaved. During the first three quarters of a pavement’s life, it typically stays in relatively good condition, but the quality drops dramatically after that. If pavement isn’t attended to before it reaches that three-quarter point, it becomes exponentially more expensive to fix, Hemesath said.

Greeley Mayor Tom Norton said council members are aware that an extra $3 million in the Food Tax fund is not enough to cover the city’s road maintenance needs, but it does help.

“The need will continue until we make a permanent change in terms of road maintenance funding,” Norton said.

After voters in 2010 rejected a dedicated sales tax for street repairs, he said there’s no “magical solution” for what to do next.

“I am not satisfied that we’ve got the right solution, but I am very well aware of the fact that the general public does not want more taxes,” Norton said.

If the city does not end up spending some of the “just in case” money it has set aside for a possible split from Weld County’s regional dispatch center, Norton said he would like to see some of that money allocated for road maintenance. But he said council members must also keep in mind the dire need for improvements to some of Greeley’s buildings.

“The fortunate thing is ... if the economy stays the same, we will continue to have carryovers,” Norton said.

Hemesath said it’s difficult to explain to the public that road maintenance can only be paid for out of Greeley’s Food Tax budget. Outside of proposing a new revenue source, such as a street utility fee, Hemesath said the only other opportunity for additional funding comes from carryover.

“A lot of our buckets of money are very specific and bound,” Hemesath said. “There are people that think we can just take our huge budget and put it toward roads, but it just doesn’t work that way.”